I got a quest for a boss creature blocking one of my gates. How does that quest work? I found the gate in the dungeon and I clicked on it from within the dungeon level, and it still told me the Big Wampir Dude was blocking it. But he was nowhere around the gate! Do I have to go finding him elsewhere?

2nd question: does regular fire scale with levels? Lighting some crates on fire is usually bad news for monsters, but my skeletons just exploded as soon as the fire touched them. No wonder since they received heaps of 20-30 hit point 'blows' from the fire. I'm a level 22 necromancer.

I got a quest for a boss creature blocking one of my gates. How does that quest work? I found the gate in the dungeon and I clicked on it from within the dungeon level, and it still told me the Big Wampir Dude was blocking it. But he was nowhere around the gate! Do I have to go finding him elsewhere?

2nd question: does regular fire scale with levels? Lighting some crates on fire is usually bad news for monsters, but my skeletons just exploded as soon as the fire touched them. No wonder since they received heaps of 20-30 hit point 'blows' from the fire. I'm a level 22 necromancer.

I'll take a shot at these.

1) I have found them right at the gate, near the gate area, and one time I had to de-stealth to trigger a stalking brood ambush to clear it. If you search the whole level there are two possibilities. Either save&exit then reload, or check the logs to make certain that that creature didn't get sent to another level or something. Like when so-and-so sends so-and-so to another level.

2)I would say that it is random, but at higher levels some fires will kill you in seocnds and that is with a character that has 1200 health.

OK I thought about it some more, and I think there may be a 'design bug' here. Essentially, every time you tweak monster hit points, you need to modify the damage of fire/poison/cave-in to match.

If you graph monster hit points vs level, and graph DPS of fire vs level, those 2 lines should be parallel ie. have the same slope. Otherwise, either the DPS/level will decrease and monsters will become more and more immune to fire, or, even worse, the graphs will meet, at which point a single second of fire will kill monsters. I think this has already happened at level 22 and the current level of monster hitpoints. Things should only get worse with higher levels.

I'm also having trouble figuring out how fire damage gets calculated. All burning things seem to use TrapOilFire, which uses both SkillTrapOilFire, which is supposed to do 25-50 plus 10-20 damage per level, as well as HazardBasicFire, which may or may not use StatusEffectBasicFire with -0.1 and -0.1 per level, which is supposed to go on for 10 seconds. In addition, there's the DirectDamagePercentFire of 0.75 and DamageOverTimePercentFire of 0.5, which is also supposed to go on for 10 seconds(?).

I just can't understand how all of this makes me get damage of ~3 at level 1 and about 18-27 at level 20 from fire. Also, what's the rate of fire damage? It appears to be much faster than 1/second: it's more like 3 or 4/second, which is why my 100 HP skeletons pop like baloons when they go near fire: 3-4 hits of around 25 damage each simply demolish them.

It still seems like there are a lot of starvation/debt quests. Over my last 3 towns I'm averaging a starvation/debt quest about once every 5 mins on slow npc mode, and without any sort of poverty modifier. This should either be slowed down, or add a soup kitchen to each town (and/or soup kitchen quest) that I could contribute to once or twice and get it over with - getting rep for how much I contribute (to some limit).

I'm also having trouble figuring out how fire damage gets calculated. All burning things seem to use TrapOilFire, which uses both SkillTrapOilFire, which is supposed to do 25-50 plus 10-20 damage per level, as well as HazardBasicFire, which may or may not use StatusEffectBasicFire with -0.1 and -0.1 per level, which is supposed to go on for 10 seconds. In addition, there's the DirectDamagePercentFire of 0.75 and DamageOverTimePercentFire of 0.5, which is also supposed to go on for 10 seconds(?).

I just can't understand how all of this makes me get damage of ~3 at level 1 and about 18-27 at level 20 from fire. Also, what's the rate of fire damage? It appears to be much faster than 1/second: it's more like 3 or 4/second, which is why my 100 HP skeletons pop like baloons when they go near fire: 3-4 hits of around 25 damage each simply demolish them.

I think the big thing you are missing is that the damage from SkillTrapOilFire is essentially spread out over the time period of the fire which is 12.5 (defined in the projectile). HazardBasicFire doesn't do any damage.

DirectDamagePercentFire and DamageOverTimePercentFire just changes how much of the damage is instant and how much of it goes into a dot (in this case StatusEffectBasicFire).

It still seems like there are a lot of starvation/debt quests. Over my last 3 towns I'm averaging a starvation/debt quest about once every 5 mins on slow npc mode, and without any sort of poverty modifier. This should either be slowed down, or add a soup kitchen to each town (and/or soup kitchen quest) that I could contribute to once or twice and get it over with - getting rep for how much I contribute (to some limit).

Yeah, I have NPCs starting out in the negatives even on towns with no modifiers. I am often doing very fast pace, so I expect to be bombarded with starvation/debt quests.

I messed up with a new character forgetting how little money you start out with -- tried donating to the warmaster who was about 2SP in debt (on a 1st level character/level 4 town/very fast pace/low stress) and lost my shirt in the bargain. That's ok, my character's recovered now.